Peter Drew’s ‘What Is A Real Aussie?’ Project

Words Jana Roose. Photos: Peter Drew & National Archives of Australia

Hidden in the National Archives of Australia for 100 years, artist Peter Drew unearths a true Aussie, and his name is Monga Khan.

Who knows what you will do? In your life you may do things you thought only heroes could. You may invent something that redefines the world. You may create the most astounding artwork that draws admirers until the day our galaxy implodes or explodes in all the terrifying ways they mention to you so casually at the planetarium. You may make someone proud. Maybe even yourself. You may do nothing. All the geniuses, artists and entrepreneurs, the do-ers that we revere, they function on a certain frequency, but what you need to know is that everyone has the dial. Tune in.

Adelaide-based artist Peter Drew came out of the static three years ago. “During the 2013 election both major parties were promising to ‘stop the boats’ and I thought that phrase was absurd coming from a nation of immigrants. At the time I was living in Glasgow. When you live overseas you quickly discover how national identity gets thrust upon you, whether you like it or not, so I decided to own it,” he says. “Before the 2013 federal election my art was apolitical. I exhibited paintings and I made street art. Looking back, it all feels a bit like practice for what I do now.”

In early 2015, Drew started a crowd-funding campaign to raise money to travel around Australia and paste up 1000 posters that would call Hammer Time on the discourse of panic and racism surrounding the asylum seeker debate. Drew designed the posters to parody simplistic nationalist slogans, so in bold, block font they declared: Real Australians Say Welcome. The campaign spread across national media and thanks to a shout out from popular design website The Design Files, the message found fertile ground in over 1000 other artists who created their own design of those four words and shared it on social media with the hashtag #realaustraliansaywelcome. Drew smashed his fundraising target and set off pasting the posters in Australia’s eight capital cities, helped along the way by donors who housed, fed, and drove him. “The highlight was definitely visiting Pauline Hanson’s old fish and chip shop to discover it’s now run by Thanh Huong Huynh, who came to this country 23 years ago, seeking asylum,” he says.

The posters pierced through the fear-mongering rhetoric of the asylum seeker issue like much-needed air holes, and Drew ran with the momentum. He set to work on a second campaign, taking inspiration from something ugly yet again: Australia’s informal and official White Australia policies. The policies were designed to keep non-European immigrants from entering, and those restrictions were also extended to Indigenous people who had left Australia and wanted to come home, some of whom had been serving overseas in the military. But there were exemptions made for individuals, particularly those who helped develop the economy, like cameleers, traders and hawkers.

At the National Archives of Australia, while searching through those exemption records, Drew found Monga Khan. “I was flicking through hundreds of photos, to the point of visual fatigue. It was only later that the image of Monga Khan jumped out at me and I thought: ‘That’s him’. There’s something heroic about the image that leaves you wanting to know more. But one of the reasons I picked Monga Khan is because he’s a Muslim male and they seem to have an unfair dose of fear directed towards them these days. I thought that everyone could do with a reminder that Muslims have a proud history in Australia that’s worth celebrating.”

Monga Khan was born in India but was Pashtun, making him ethnically Afghan. The photograph was taken in 1916, when Khan was granted an exemption so he could continue his work as a hawker – essentially a travelling general store – in rural Victoria. Drew was so struck by the photo he decided Khan would be the emblem of his next poster campaign. This time he printed large-scale early-20th century photographs of exempted immigrants, but mostly Khan, with one simple word below: Aussie. The effect? To clash with many people’s idea of what it is to be Australian, bringing us up to speed on a truth that’s existed for over 100 years, in one powerful image.

In the exemption files, Drew also found the applicants’ character references. “Some are quite personal and moving. One man included a clipping describing the celebrations held at his local town hall to wish him farewell and a safe return. The important thing to remember is that every one of these applications were made because… despite the hardship they endured they wanted to come back. I think that shows an element of courage worth celebrating.” In Auburn, a suburb of Sydney with a large immigrant population, a poster of Monga Khan has his face eradicated in black paint, and the word ‘Aussie’ slashed out below. “Every now and then I encounter some pretty vile racism but it doesn’t affect me, I don’t let it,” Drew says. “I choose not to feed it with any kind of attention. That how I keep going. I also get plenty of criticism and it’s equally useful in helping to strengthen my resolve. Criticism can be more useful than support in helping clarify your own position.”

When Drew initially planned the project it was about prodding people who aren’t open to asylum seekers, who fear the notion of welcoming a stranger who arrives in the shackles of our preconceived notions. However, as the project rolled out he realised there was a whole other audience he hadn’t considered – the asylum seekers themselves. Those who are already living in the community could see these posters and feel a friendly hand on their shoulder. “I was contacted by a bunch of Afghan asylum seekers in Melbourne who took me out for a great Afghan meal and insisted on driving me to the airport. They’d been through a lot. After escaping Afghanistan they’d all met in an Australian detention centre, but they wanted to help me [on the poster trail]. I was very impressed by their strength of character.”

Having slam-dunked his crowd-funding target for the Monga Khan posters, Drew is now using the surplus money to commission artists and writers to produce works and publish a collection of short stories and poems about Monga Khan as an historical fiction anthology. What else does he hope to do? “My hopes for this project are absurdly ambitious so I’ll just be sensible and say I’d like Monga Khan to become an immortal cultural icon of Australia, for ever and ever, amen.”